Aristotle is famously quoted as saying “Man is by nature a social animal…society is something that precedes the individual.” Interestingly, this quote remains significant in light of Kieran Healy’s article, “Using Metadata to find Paul Revere”, but provides an interesting conjecture to the way in which we might rethink the idea of man as a socially connected creature.
In Healy’s mention of Breiger’s paper “The Duality of Persons and Groups”, she recounts it as discussing a “basic way to represent information about links between people and some other kind of thing, like attendance at various events, or membership in various groups.” This was the foundation of a “new science of social network analysis” where you would be capable of gathering information about and understanding a person’s interests and social life solely based on metadata, “without much reference to the actual content of what they say.”
The point reminded me of a class on social network analysis I took my freshman year- the class exposed me to social network analysis tools like Wolfram Alpha, in which we attempted to create networks based on the relationships formed between over 100 characters in a Scandinavian mythological tale.
If we take Aristotle’s claim that “society precedes the individual” to be true, society absorbs the emotional cost of a death traditionally through rituals, prayers etc. There seems to be a need to create a non-physical presence in honor of remembering someone- this is why we commemorate death anniversaries, visit tombstones and erect memorials for the deceased in war.
However, when this is translated to metadata, it seems that death cannot be properly accounted for by a computer or social network analysis tool. What are we expected to do with someone’s Facebook profile when they die? Does the decreased retain the same privileges that one actively operating his Facebook profile would experience- unique in its individuality but also a combination of universally established metadata standards?
While not an immediately pressing concern in day-to-day human interaction, a death in a Scandinavian tale (there were many deaths, thus constantly changing the dynamic and direction of progress for the story) heavily impacted narrative progress and how characters would interact with one another. When this was translated onto a social network tool, neither removing the character’s profile completely nor leaving it as is seemed to work- if the connection remained we had to account for the fact that he could not introduce mutual friends, yet removing him would cause other characters to lose connection with one another.
Speaking from the point of view of a human, the deceased still remains connected to his networks in that everyone remembers him. However, these connections, when manifest in social network analysis, differ from those established between two people who are still alive- effectively questioning how the duality of persons and groups is accounted for in light of death. Does one relinquish his membership in a group through physical absence, or does others’ remembrance and retention of their emotional ties with him suffice as presence? How then, will this affect metadata standards and the accurate representation of one’s identity through social networks?